Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback. Nobody in this
little church just off Times Square in Manhattan thinks of themselves
as political. They're spiritual -- actors and athletes and pretty
young things who believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant
dictation from God. They look down from the balcony of the Morning
Star, swaying and smiling at the screen that tells them how to
sing along. Nail-pierced hands, a wounded side. This is love,
this is love! But on this evening in January, politics and all
its worldly machinations have entered their church. Sitting in
the darkness of the front row is Sam Brownback, the Republican
senator from Kansas. And hunched over on the stage in a red leather
chair is an old man named Harald Bredesen, who has come to anoint
Brownback as the Christian right's next candidate for president.

Over the last six decades, Bredesen has prayed with so many presidents
and prime ministers and kings that he can barely remember their
names. He's the spiritual father of Pat Robertson, the man behind
the preacher's vast media empire. He was one of three pastors
who laid hands on Ronald Reagan in 1970 and heard the Pasadena
Prophecy: the moment when God told Reagan that he would one day
occupy the White House. And he recently dispatched one of his
proteges to remind George W. Bush of the divine will -- and evangelical
power -- behind his presidency.

Tonight, Bredesen has come to breathe that power into Brownback's
presidential campaign. After little more than a decade in Washington,
Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center
of the Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American
politics. Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required
only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's
vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now,
Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics
but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one
he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the
state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country
so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric
of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare
-- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be
no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage.
Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business
and the church will take care of all.

Bredesen squints through the stage lights at Brownback, sitting
straight-backed and attentive. At forty-nine, the senator looks
taller than he is. His face is wide and flat, his skin thick
like leather, etched by windburn and sun from years of working
on his father's farm just outside Parker, Kansas, population
281. You can hear it in his voice: slow, distant but warm; a
baritone, spoken out of the left side of his mouth in half-sentences
with few hard consonants. It sounds like the voice of someone
who has learned how to wait for rain.

"He wants to be president," Bredesen tells the congregation.
"He is marvelously qualified to be president." But,
he adds, there is something Brownback wants even more: "And
that is, on the last day of your earthly life, to be able to
say, 'Father, the work you gave me to do, I have accomplished!'"
Bredesen, shrunken with age, leans forward and glares at Brownback.

The crowd roars. Those occupying the front rows lay hands
on the contender.

Brownback takes the stage. He begins to pace. In front of
secular audiences he's a politician, stiff and wonky. Here, he's
a preacher, not sweaty but smooth, working a call-and-response
with the back rows. "I used to run on Sam power," he
says.

"Uh-uh," someone shouts.

To quiet his ambition, Brownback continues, he used to take
sleeping pills.

"Oh, Lord!"

Now he runs on God power.

"Hallelujah!"

He tells a story about a chaplain who challenged a group of
senators to reconsider their conception of democracy. "How
many constituents do you have?" the chaplain asked. The
senators answered: 4 million, 9 million, 12 million. "May
I suggest," the chaplain replied, "that you have only
one constituent?"

Brownback pauses. That moment, he declares, changed his life.
"This" -- being senator, running for president, waving
the flag of a Christian nation -- "is about serving one
constituent." He raises a hand and points above him.

From the balcony a hallelujah, an amen, a yelp. From Bredesen's
great white head, now peering up from the front row, Brownback
wins an appreciative nod.

This boy, Bredesen thinks, may be the chosen one.

* * *

Back in 1994, when Brownback came to Congress as a freshman,
he was so contemptuous of federal authority that he refused at
first to sign the Contract With America, Newt Gingrich's right-wing
manifesto -- not because it was too radical but because it was
too tame. Republicans shouldn't just reform big government, Brownback
insisted -- they should eliminate it. He immediately proposed
abolishing the departments of education, energy and commerce.
His proposals failed -- but they quickly made him one of the
right's rising stars. Two years later, running to the right of
Bob Dole's chosen successor, he was elected to the Senate.

"I am a seeker," he says. Brownback believes that
every spiritual path has its own unique scent, and he wants to
inhale them all. When he ran for the House he was a Methodist.
By the time he ran for the Senate he was an evangelical. Now
he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in a church but
in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street that
is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic
priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power.
Brownback also studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn.
"Deep," says the rabbi, Nosson Scherman. Lately, Brownback
has been reading the Koran, but he doesn't like what he's finding.
"There's some difficult material in it with regard to the
Christian and the Jew," he tells a Christian radio program,
voice husky with regret.

Brownback is not part of the GOP leadership, and he doesn't
want to be. He once told a group of businessmen he wanted to
be the next Jesse Helms -- "Senator No," who operated
as a one-man demolition unit against godlessness, independent
of his party. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a man with presidential
ambitions of his own, gave Brownback a plum position on the Judiciary
Committee, perhaps hoping that Brownback would provide a counterbalance
to Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who threatened to make
trouble for Bush's appointees. Instead, taking a page from Helms,
Brownback turned the position into a platform for a high-profile
war against gay marriage, porn and abortion. Casting Bush and
the Republican leadership as soft and muddled, he regularly turns
sleepy hearings into platforms for his vision of America, inviting
a parade of angry witnesses to denounce the "homosexual
agenda," "bestiality" and "murder."

He is running for president because murder is always on his
mind: the abortion of what he considers fetal citizens. He speaks
often and admiringly of John Brown, the abolitionist who massacred
five pro-slavery settlers just north of the farm where Brownback
grew up. Brown wanted to free the slaves; Brownback wants to
free fetuses. He loves each and every one of them. "Just
. . . sacred," he says. In January, during the confirmation
of Samuel Alito for a seat on the Supreme Court, Brownback compared
Roe v. Wade to the now disgraced rulings that once upheld segregation.

Alito was in the Senate hearing room that day largely because
of Brownback's efforts. Last October, after Bush named his personal
lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, Brownback politely
but thoroughly demolished her nomination -- on the grounds that
she was insufficiently opposed to abortion. The day Miers withdrew
her name, Sen. John McCain surprised the mob of reporters clamoring
around Brownback outside the Senate chamber by grabbing his colleague's
shoulders. "Here's the man who did it!" McCain shouted
in admiration, a big smile on his face.

Brownback is unlikely to receive the Republican presidential
nomination -- but as the candidate of the Christian right, he
may well be in a position to determine who does, and what they
include in their platform. "What Sam could do very effectively,"
says the Rev. Rob Schenck, an evangelical activist, is hold the
nomination hostage until the Christian right "exacts the
last pledge out of the more popular candidate."

The nation's leading evangelicals have already lined up behind
Brownback, a feat in itself. A decade ago, evangelical support
for a Catholic would have been unthinkable. Many evangelicals
viewed the Pope as the Antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church
as the Whore of Babylon. But Brownback is the beneficiary of
a strategy known as co-belligerency -- a united front between
conservative Catholics and evangelicals in the culture war. Pat
Robertson has tapped the "outstanding senator from Kansas"
as his man for president. David Barton, the Christian right's
all-but-official presidential historian, calls Brownback "uncompromising"
-- the highest praise in a movement that considers intransigence
next to godliness. And James Dobson, the movement's strongest
chieftain, can find no fault in Brownback. "He has fulfilled
every expectation," Dobson says. Even Jesse Helms, now in
retirement in North Carolina, recognizes a kindred spirit. "The
most effective senators are those who are truest to themselves,"
Helms says. "Senator Brownback is becoming known as that
sort of individual."

* * *

As he gathers the forces of the Christian right around him,
however, Brownback has broken with the movement's tradition of
fire and brimstone. His fundamentalism is almost tender. He's
no less intolerant than the angry pulpit-pounders, but he never
sounds like a hater. His style is both gentler and colder, a
mixture of Mr. Rogers and monkish detachment.

Brownback doesn't thump the Bible. He reads obsessively, studying
biographies of Christian crusaders from centuries past. His learning
doesn't lend him gravitas so much as it seems to free him from
gravity, to set him adrift across space and time. Ask him why
he considers abortion a "holocaust," and he'll answer
by way of a story about an eighteenth-century British parliamentarian
who broke down in tears over the sin of slavery. Brownback believes
America is entering a period of religious revival on the scale
of the Great Awakening that preceded the nation's creation, an
epidemic of mass conversions, signs and wonders, book burnings.
But this time, he says, the upheaval will give way to a "cultural
springtime," a theocratic order that is pleasant and balmy.
It's a vision shared by the mega-churches that sprawl across
the surburban landscape, the 24-7 spiritual-entertainment complexes
where millions of Americans embrace a feel-good fundamentalism.

When Brownback travels, he tries to avoid spending time alone
in his hotel room, where indecent television programming might
tempt him. In Washington, though, he goes to bed early. He doesn't
like to eat out. Indeed, it sometimes seems he doesn't like to
eat at all -- his staff worries when the only thing he has for
lunch is a communion wafer and a drop of wine at the noontime
Mass he tries to attend daily. He lives in a spartan apartment
across from his office that he shares with Sen. Jim Talent, a
Republican from Missouri, and he flies home to Topeka almost
every Thursday. On the wall of his office, there's a family portrait
of all seven Brownbacks gathered around two tree stumps, each
Brownback in black shoes, blue jeans and a black pullover. The
oldest, Abby, is nineteen; the youngest, Jenna, abandoned on
the doorstep of a Chinese orphanage when she was two days old,
is seven.

Brownback's house in Topeka perches atop a hill, shielded
from the road behind a great arc of driveway in a nameless suburb
so new that the grass has yet to sprout on nearby lawns. On a
recent Sunday, Brownback sits in the kitchen, looking relaxed
in jeans and an orange sweatshirt that says HOODWINKED, the name
of his oldest son's band. Hoodwinked members drift in and out,
chatting with the senator. When the band starts practice in the
basement, Brownback walks downstairs, opens the door, jerks his
right knee in the air and half windmills his arm. Hoodwinked
shout at him to leave them alone.

When he was a boy, Brownback didn't belong to any rock bands.
He grew up in a white, one-story farmhouse in Parker, where his
parents still live. Brownback likes to say that he is fighting
for traditional family values, but his father, Bob, was more
concerned about the price of grain, and his mother, Nancy, had
no qualms about having a gay friend. Back then, moral values
were simple. "Your word was your word. Don't cheat,"
his mother recalls. "I can't think of anything else."

Her son played football ("quarterback" she says,
"never very good") and was elected class president
and "Mr. Spirit." "He was talkative," she
adds, as if this were an alien quality. Like most kids in Parker,
Sam just wanted to be a farmer. But that life is gone now, destroyed
by what the old farmers who sit around the town's single gas
station sum up in one word -- "Reaganism." They mean
the voodoo economics by which the government favored corporate
interests over family farms, a "what's good for big business
is good for America" philosophy that Brownback himself now
champions.

In 1986, just a few years after finishing law school, Brownback
landed one of the state's plum offices: agriculture secretary,
a position of no small influence in Kansas. But in 1993, he was
forced out when a federal court ruled his tenure unconstitutional.
Not only had he not been elected, he'd been appointed by people
who weren't elected -- the very same agribusiness giants he was
in charge of regulating.

The following year, he squeaked into Congress, running as
a moderate. But in Washington, in the midst of the Gingrich Revolution,
Brownback didn't just tack right -- he unzipped his quiet Kansan
costume and stepped out as the leader of the New Federalists,
the small but potent faction of freshmen determined to get rid
of government almost entirely. When he discovered that the Republican
leadership wasn't really interested in derailing its own gravy
train, Brownback began spending more time with his Bible. He
began to suspect that the problem with government wasn't just
too many taxes; it was not enough God.

Brownback's wife, Mary, heiress to a Midwest newspaper fortune,
married Sam during her final year of law school and boasts that
she has never worked outside the home. "Basically,"
she says, "I live in the kitchen." From her spot by
the stove, Mary monitors all media consumed by her kids. The
Brownbacks block several channels, but even so, innuendos slip
by, she says, and the nightly news is often "too sexual."
The children, Mary says, "exude their faith." The oldest
kids "opt out" of sex education at school.

Sex, in all its various forms, is at the center of Brownback's
agenda. America, he believes, has divorced sexuality from what
is sacred. "It's not that we think too much about sex,"
he says, "it's that we don't think enough of it." The
senator would gladly roll back the sexual revolution altogether
if he could, but he knows he can't, so instead he dreams of something
better: a culture of "faith-based" eroticism in which
premarital passion plays out not in flesh but in prayer. After
Janet Jackson's nipple made its surprise appearance at the 2004
Super Bowl, Brownback introduced the Broadcast Decency Enforcement
Act, raising the fines for such on-air abominations to $325,000.

On Sundays, Brownback rises at dawn so he can catch a Catholic
Mass before meeting Mary and the kids at Topeka Bible Church.
With the exception of one brown-skinned man, the congregation
is entirely white. The stage looks like a rec room in a suburban
basement: wall-to-wall carpet, wood paneling, a few haphazard
ferns and a couple of electric guitars lying around. This morning,
the church welcomes a guest preacher from Promise Keepers, a
men's group, by performing a skit about golf and fatherhood.
From his preferred seat in the balcony, Brownback chuckles when
he's supposed to, sings every song, nods seriously when the preacher
warns against "Judaizers" who would "poison"
the New Testament.

After the service, Brownback introduces me to a white-haired
man with a yellow Viking mustache. "This is the man who
wrote 'Dust in the Wind,'" the senator announces proudly.
It's Kerry Livgren of the band Kansas. Livgren has found Jesus
and now worships with the senator at Topeka Bible. Brownback,
one of the Senate's fiercest hawks on Israel, tells Livgren he
wants to take him to the Holy Land. Whenever the senator met
with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to talk policy, he insisted
that they first study Scripture together. The two men would study
their Bibles, music playing softly in the background. Maybe,
if Livgren goes to Israel with Brownback, he could strum "Dust
in the Wind." "Carry on my . . ." the senator
warbles, trying to remember another song by his friend.

* * *

One of the little-known strengths of the Christian right lies
in its adoption of the "cell" -- the building block
historically used by small but determined groups to impose their
will on the majority. Seventy years ago, an evangelist named
Abraham Vereide founded a network of "God-led" cells
comprising senators and generals, corporate executives and preachers.
Vereide believed that the cells -- God's chosen, appointed to
power -- could construct a Kingdom of God on earth with Washington
as its capital. They would do so "behind the scenes,"
lest they be accused of pride or a hunger for power, and "beyond
the din of vox populi," which is to say, outside the bounds
of democracy. To insiders, the cells were known as the Family,
or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they were not known at
all.

"Communists use cells as their basic structure,"
declares a confidential Fellowship document titled "Thoughts
on a Core Group." "The mafia operates like this, and
the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four-man squad. Hitler,
Lenin and many others understood the power of a small group of
people." Under Reagan, Fellowship cells quietly arranged
meetings between administration officials and leaders of Salvadoran
death squads, and helped funnel military support to Siad Barre,
the brutal dictator of Somalia, who belonged to a prayer cell
of American senators and generals.

Brownback got involved in the Fellowship in 1979, as a summer
intern for Bob Dole, when he lived in a residence the group had
organized in a sorority house at the University of Maryland.
Four years later, fresh out of law school and looking for a political
role model, Brownback sought out Frank Carlson, a former Republican
senator from Kansas. It was Carlson who, at a 1955 meeting of
the Fellowship, had declared the group's mission to be "Worldwide
Spiritual Offensive," a vision of manly Christianity dedicated
to the expansion of American power as a means of spreading the
gospel.

Over the years, Brownback became increasingly active in the
Fellowship. But he wasn't invited to join a cell until 1994,
when he went to Washington. "I had been working with them
for a number of years, so when I went into Congress I knew I
wanted to get back into that," he says. "Washington
-- power -- is very difficult to handle. I knew I needed people
to keep me accountable in that system."

Brownback was placed in a weekly prayer cell by "the
shadow Billy Graham" -- Doug Coe, Vereide's successor as
head of the Fellowship. The group was all male and all Republican.
It was a "safe relationship," Brownback says. Conversation
tended toward the personal. Brownback and the other men revealed
the most intimate details of their desires, failings, ambitions.
They talked about lust, anger and infidelities, the more shameful
the better -- since the goal was to break one's own will. The
abolition of self; to become nothing but a vessel so that one
could be used by God.

They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus
plus nothing" -- a government led by Christ's will alone.
In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes,
war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according
to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself
is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher
set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club
blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members
in a million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street
that was subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent
was $600 per man -- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some
said it bordered on an ethical violation, but no charges were
ever brought.

Brownback still meets with the prayer cell every Tuesday evening.
He and his "brothers," he says, are "bonded together,
faith and souls." The rules forbid Brownback from revealing
the names of his fellow members, but those in the cell likely
include such conservative stalwarts as Rep. Zach Wamp of Tennessee,
former Rep. Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Sen. Tom Coburn, an
Oklahoma doctor who has advocated the death penalty for abortion
providers. Fellowship documents suggest that some 30 senators
and 200 congressmen occasionally attend the group's activities,
but no more than a dozen are involved at Brownback's level.

The men in Brownback's cell talk about politics, but the senator
insists it's not political. "It's about faith and action,"
he says. According to "Thoughts on a Core Group," the
primary purpose of the cell is to become an "invisible 'believing'
group." Any action the cell takes is an outgrowth of belief,
a natural extension of "agreements reached in faith and
in prayer." Deals emerge not from a smoke-filled room but
from a prayer-filled room. "Typically," says Brownback,
"one person grows desirous of pursuing an action" --
a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy -- "and the
others pull in behind."

In 1999, Brownback worked with Rep. Joe Pitts, a Fellowship
brother, to pass the Silk Road Strategy Act, designed to block
the growth of Islam in Central Asian nations by bribing them
with lucrative trade deals. That same year, he teamed up with
two Fellowship associates -- former Sen. Don Nickles and the
late Sen. Strom Thurmond -- to demand a criminal investigation
of a liberal group called Americans United for Separation of
Church and State. Last year, several Fellowship brothers, including
Sen. John Ensign, another resident of the C Street house, supported
Brownback's broadcast decency bill. And Pitts and Coburn joined
Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act to allow
tax-free churches to endorse candidates.

The most bluntly theocratic effort, however, is the Constitution
Restoration Act, which Brownback co-sponsored with Jim DeMint,
another former C Streeter who was then a congressman from South
Carolina. If passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability
to even hear cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses
of power. Say the mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus
lord and fire anyone who refuses to do so; or the principal of
your local high school decides to read a fundamentalist prayer
over the PA every morning; or the president declares the United
States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution Restoration
Act, that'll all be just fine.

Brownback points to his friend Ed Meese, who served as attorney
general under Reagan, as an example of a man who wields power
through backroom Fellowship connections. Meese has not held a
government job for nearly two decades, but through the Fellowship
he's more influential than ever, credited with brokering the
recent nomination of John Roberts to head the Supreme Court.
"As a behind-the-scenes networker," Brownback says,
"he's important." In the senator's view, such hidden
power is sanctioned by the Bible. "Everybody knows Moses,"
Brownback says. "But who were the leaders of the Jewish
people once they got to the promised land? It's a lot of people
who are unknown."

* * *

Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer
brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell -- one explicitly
dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values
Action Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading
organizations on the religious right. James Dobson's Focus on
the Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council,
the Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values
Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the
Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off
the record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from
discussing the proceedings. It's a little "cloak-and-dagger,"
says a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and
the enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."

The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure
groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers
with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working
almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights
against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime
legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The
VAT helped win passage of Brownback's broadcast decency bill
and made the president's tax cuts a top priority. When it comes
to "impacting policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family
Research Council, "day to day, the VAT is instrumental."

As chairman of the Helsinki Commission, the most important
U.S. human rights agency, Brownback has also stamped much of
U.S. foreign policy with VAT's agenda. One victory for the group
was Brownback's North Korea Human Rights Act, which establishes
a confrontational stance toward the dictatorial regime and shifts
funds for humanitarian aid from the United Nations to Christian
organizations. Sean Woo -- Brownback's former general counsel
and now the chief of staff of the Helsinki Commission -- calls
this a process of "privatizing democracy." A dapper
man with a soothing voice, Woo is perhaps the brightest thinker
in Brownback's circle, a savvy internationalist with a deep knowledge
of Cold War history. Yet when I ask him for an example of the
kind of project the human-rights act might fund, he tells me
about a German doctor who releases balloons over North Korea
with bubble-wrapped radios tied to them. North Koreans are supposed
to find the balloons when they run out of helium and use the
radios to tune into Voice of America or a South Korean Christian
station.

Since Brownback took over leadership of the VAT in 2002, he
has used it to consolidate his position in the Christian right
-- and his influence in the Senate. If senators -- even leaders
like Bill Frist or Rick Santorum -- want to ask for backing from
the group, they must talk to Brownback's chief of staff, Robert
Wasinger, who clears attendees with his boss. Wasinger is from
Hays, Kansas, but he speaks with a Harvard drawl, and he is still
remembered in Cambridge twelve years after graduation for a fight
he led to get gay faculty booted. He was particularly concerned
about the welfare of gay men; or rather, as he wrote in a campus
magazine funded by the Heritage Foundation, that of their innocent
sperm, forced to "swim into feces." As gatekeeper of
the VAT, he's a key strategist in the conservative movement.
He makes sure the religious leaders who attend VAT understand
that Brownback is the boss -- and that other senators realize
that every time Brownback speaks, he has the money and membership
of the VAT behind him.

VAT is like a closed communication circuit with Brownback
at the switch: The power flows through him. Every Wednesday at
noon, he trots upstairs from his office to a radio studio maintained
by the Republican leadership to rally support from Christian
America for VAT's agenda. One participant in the broadcast, Salem
Radio Network News, reaches more than 1,500 Christian stations
nationwide, and Focus on the Family offers access to an audience
of 1.5 million. During a recent broadcast Brownback explains
that with the help of the VAT, he's working to defeat a measure
that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and
lesbians. Members of VAT help by mobilizing their flocks: An
e-mail sent out by the Family Research Council warned that the
hate-crime bill would lead, inexorably, to the criminalization
of Christianity.

Brownback recently muscled through the Judiciary Committee
a proposed amendment to the Constitution to make not just gay
marriage but even civil unions nearly impossible. "I don't
see where the compromise point would be on marriage," he
says. The amendment has no chance of passing, but it's not designed
to. It's a time bomb, scheduled to detonate sometime during the
2006 electoral cycle. The intended victims aren't Democrats but
other Republicans. GOP moderates will be forced to vote for or
against "marriage," which -- in the language of the
VAT communications network -- is another way of saying for or
against the "homosexual agenda." It's a typical VAT
strategy: a tool with which to purify the ranks of the Republican
Party.

* * *

Eleven years ago, Brownback himself underwent a similar process
of purification. It started, he says, with a strange bump on
his right side: a melanoma, diagnosed in 1995.

Brownback is sitting in the Senate dining room surrounded
by back-slapping senators and staffers, yet he seems serene.
His press secretary tries to stop him from talking -- he considers
Brownback's cancer epiphany suitable only for religious audiences
-- but Brownback can't be distracted. His eyes open wide and
his shoulders slump as he settles into the memory. He starts
using words like "meditation" and "solitude."
The press secretary winces.

The doctors scooped out a piece of his flesh, Brownback says,
as if murmuring to himself. A minor procedure, but it scared
him. In his mind, he lost hold of everything. He asked himself,
"What have I done with my life?" The answer seemed
to be "Nothing."

One night, while his family was sleeping, Brownback got up
and pulled out a copy of his resume. Sitting in his silent house,
in the middle of the night, a scar over his ribs where cancer
had been carved out of his body, he looked down at the piece
of paper. His work, the laws he had passed. "This must be
who I am," he thought. Then he realized: Nothing he had
done would last. All his accomplishments were humdrum conservative
measures, bureaucratic wrangling, legislation that had nothing
to do with God. They were worth nothing.

Brownback turns, holds my gaze. "So," he says, "I
burned it."

He smiles. He pauses. He's waiting to see if I understand.
He had cleansed himself with fire. He had made himself pure.

"I'm a child of the living God," he explains.

I nod.

"You are, too," he says. He purses his lips as he
searches the other tables. Look, he says, pointing to a man across
the room. "Mark Dayton, over there?" The Democratic
senator from Minnesota. "He's a liberal." But you know
what else he is? "A beautiful child of the living God."
Brownback continues. Ted Kennedy? "A beautiful child of
the living God." Hillary Clinton? Yes. Even Hillary. Especially
Hillary.

Once, Brownback says, he hated Hillary Clinton. Hated her
so much it hurt him. But he reached in and scooped that hatred
out like a cancer. Now, he loves her. She, too, is a beautiful
child of the living God.

* * *

After his spiritual transformation, Brownback began traveling
to some of the most blighted regions in the world. At times his
motivation appeared strictly economic. He toured the dictatorships
of Central Asia, trading U.S. support for access to oil -- but
he insists that he wanted to prevent their wealth from falling
into "Islamic hands." Oil may have spurred his interest
in Africa, too -- the U.S. competes with China for access to
African oil fields -- but the welfare of the world's most afflicted
continent has since become a genuine obsession for Brownback.
He has traveled to Darfur, in Sudan, and he has just returned
from the Congo, where the starving die at a rate of 1,000 a day.
Recalling the child soldiers he's met in Uganda, his voice chokes
and his eyes fill with horror.

When Brownback talks about Africa, he sounds like JFK, or
even Bono. "We're only five percent of the population,"
he says, "but we're responsible for thirty percent of the
world's economy, thirty-three percent of military spending. We're
going to be held accountable for the assets we've been given."
His definition of moral decadence includes America's failure
to stop genocide in the Sudan and torture in North Korea. He
wants drug companies to spend as much on medicine for malaria
as they do on feel-good drugs for Americans, like Viagra and
Prozac. Ask him what drives him and he'll answer, without irony,
"widows and orphans." It's a reference to the New Testament
Epistle of James: "Religion that God our father accepts
as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows
in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by
the world."

Brownback is less concerned about the world being polluted
by people. His biggest financial backer is Koch Industries, an
oil company that ranks among America's largest privately held
companies. "The Koch folks," as they're known around
the senator's office, are among the nation's worst polluters.
In 2000, the company was slapped with the largest environmental
civil penalty in U.S. history for illegally discharging 3 million
gallons of crude oil in six states. That same year Koch was indicted
for lying about its emissions of benzene, a chemical linked to
leukemia, and dodged criminal charges in return for a $20 million
settlement. Brownback has received nearly $100,000 from Koch
and its employees, and during his neck-and-neck race in 1996,
a mysterious shell company called Triad Management provided $410,000
for last-minute advertising on Brownback's behalf. A Senate investigative
committee later determined that the money came from the two brothers
who run Koch Industries.

Brownback has been a staunch opponent of environmental regulations
that Koch finds annoying, fighting fuel-efficiency standards
and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. But for the senator,
there's no real divide between the predatory economic interests
of his corporate backers and his own moral passions. He received
more money funneled through Jack Abramoff, the GOP lobbyist under
investigation for bilking Indian tribes of more than $80 million,
than all but four other senators -- and he blocked a casino that
Abramoff's clients viewed as a competitor. But getting Brownback
to vote against gambling doesn't take bribes; he would have done
so regardless of the money.

Brownback finds the issue of finances distasteful. He refuses
to discuss his backers, smoothly turning the issue to matters
of faith. "Pat got me elected," he says, referring
to Robertson's network of Christian-right organizations. Sitting
in his corner office in the Senate, Brownback returns to one
of his favorite subjects: the scourge of homosexuality. The office
has just been remodeled and the high-ceilinged room is almost
barren. On Brownback's desk, adrift at the far end of the room,
there's a Bible open to the Gospel of John.

It doesn't bother Brownback that most Bible scholars challenge
the idea that Scripture opposes homosexuality. "It's pretty
clear," he says, "what we know in our hearts."
This, he says, is "natural law," derived from observation
of the world, but the logic is circular: It's wrong because he
observes himself believing it's wrong.

He has worldly proof, too. "You look at the social impact
of the countries that have engaged in homosexual marriage."
He shakes his head in sorrow, thinking of Sweden, which Christian
conservatives believe has been made by "social engineering"
into an outer ring of hell. "You'll know 'em by their fruits,"
Brownback says. He pauses, and an awkward silence fills the room.
He was citing scripture -- Matthew 7:16 -- but he just called
gay Swedes "fruits."

Homosexuality may not be sanctioned by the Bible, but slavery
is -- by Old and New Testaments alike. Brownback thinks slavery
is wrong, of course, but the Bible never is. How does he square
the two? "I've wondered on that very issue," he says.
He tentatively suggests that the Bible views slavery as a "person-to-person
relationship," something to be worked out beyond the intrusion
of government. But he quickly abandons the argument; calling
slavery a personal choice, after all, is awkward for a man who
often compares slavery to abortion.

* * *

Although Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002 through
Opus Dei, an ultraorthodox order that, like the Fellowship, specializes
in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his
religious and political thinking is Charles Colson, the former
Nixon aide who served seven months in prison for his attempt
to cover up Watergate. A "key figure," says Brownback,
in the power structure of Christian Washington, Colson is widely
acknowledged as the Christian right's leading intellectual. He
is the architect behind faith-based initiatives, the negotiator
who forged the Catholic-evangelical unity known as co-belligerency,
and the man who drove sexual morality to the top of the movement's
agenda.

"When I came to the Senate," says Brownback, "I
sought him out. I had been listening to his thoughts for years,
and wanted to get to know him some."

The admiration is mutual. Colson, a powerful member of the
Fellowship, spotted Brownback as promising material not long
after he joined the group's cell for freshman Republicans. At
the time, Colson was holding classes on "biblical worldview"
for leaders on Capitol Hill, and Brownback became a prize pupil.
Colson taught that abortion is only a "threshold" issue,
a wedge with which to introduce fundamentalism into every question.
The two men soon grew close, and began coordinating their efforts:
Colson provides the strategy, and Brownback translates it into
policy. "Sam has been at the meetings I called, and I've
been at the meetings he called," Colson says.

Colson's most admirable work is Prison Fellowship, a ministry
that offers counseling and "worldview training" to
prisoners around the world. Many of his programs receive federal
funding, and Brownback is sponsoring a bill that would make it
easier for more government dollars to go to faith-based programs
such as Colson's. Social scientists debate whether such programs
work, but politicians consider them undeniable evidence of the
existence of compassionate conservatism.

And yet compassionate conservatism, as Colson conceives it
and Brownback implements it, is strikingly similar to plain old
authoritarian conservatism. In place of liberation, it offers
as an ideal what Colson calls "biblical obedience"
and what Brownback terms "submission." The concept
is derived from Romans 13, the scripture by which Brownback and
Colson understand their power as God-given: "Whosoever therefore
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they
that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

To Brownback, the verse is not dictatorial -- it's simply
one of the demands of spiritual war, the "worldwide spiritual
offensive" that the Fellowship declared a half-century ago.
"There's probably a higher level of Christians being persecuted
during the last ten, twenty years than . . . throughout human
history," Brownback once declared on Colson's radio show.
Given to framing his own faith in terms of battles, he believes
that secularists and Muslims are fighting a worldwide war against
Christians -- sometimes in concert. "Religious freedom"
is one of his top priorities, and securing it may require force.
He's sponsored legislation that could lead to "regime change"
in Iran, and has proposed sending combat troops to the Philippines,
where Islamic rebels killed a Kansas missionary.

Brownback doesn't demand that everyone believe in his God
-- only that they bow down before Him. Part holy warrior, part
holy fool, he preaches an odd mix of theological naivete and
diplomatic savvy. The faith he wields in the public square is
blunt, heavy, unsubtle; brass knuckles of the spirit. But the
religion of his heart is that of the woman whose example led
him deep into orthodoxy: Mother Teresa -- it is a kiss for the
dying. He sees no tension between his intolerance and his tenderness.
Indeed, their successful reconciliation in his political self
is the miracle at the heart of the new fundamentalism, the fusion
of hellfire and Hallmark.

"I have seen him weep," growls Colson, anointing
Brownback with his highest praise. Such are the new American
crusaders: tear-streaked strong men huddling together to talk
about their feelings before they march forth, their sentimental
faith sharpened and their man-feelings hardened into "natural
law." They are God's promise keepers, His defenders of marriage,
His knights of the fetal citizen. They are the select few who
embody the paradoxical love promised by Christ when he declares
-- in Matthew 10:34 -- "I did not come to bring peace, but
a sword."

Standing on his back porch in Topeka, Brownback looks down
into a dark patch of hedge trees, a gnarled hardwood that's nearly
unsplittable. The same trees grow on the 1,400 acres that surround
Brownback's childhood home in Parker; not much else remains.
When the senator was a boy, there were eleven families living
on the land. Now there are only the Brownbacks and a friend from
high school who lives rent-free in one of the empty houses. When
the friend moves on, Brownback's father plans to tear the house
down. The rest of the homes are already taking care of themselves,
slowly crumbling into the prairie. The world Brownback grew up
in has vanished.

In its place, Brownback imagines another one. Standing on
his porch, he thinks back to the days before the Civil War, when
his home state was known as Bloody Kansas and John Brown fought
for freedom with an ax. "A terrorist," concedes Brownback,
careful not to offend his Southern supporters, but also a wise
man. When Brown was in jail awaiting execution, a visitor told
the abolitionist that he was crazy.

"I'm not the one who has 4 million people in bondage,"
Brownback intones, recalling Brown's response. "I, sir,
think you are crazy."

This is another of Brownback's parables. In place of 4 million
slaves, he thinks of uncountable unborn babies, of all the persecuted
Christians -- a nation within a nation, awaiting Brownback's
liberation. Brownback, sir, thinks that secular America is crazy.

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